Talk:behavior

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Why does behavior have two senses and behaviour only one? Is the UK usage more restricted? RJFJR 14:54, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think so. I edited the inanimate sense BTW. DCDuring TALK 15:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Also, are these words sometimes uncountable? RJFJR 15:01, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, possibly even more commonly. "A behavior" (countable) means an instance of behavior (uncountable) or a habit (repeated behaviors). "That kind of behavior won't be tolerated in this classroom." is an example of the uncountable sense and seems to me to exemplify the most common everyday usage. The countable sense is used in psychological contexts. An analogous distinction would apply in the device/system sense, I think. DCDuring TALK 15:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

But "that behaviour won't be tolerated" is commonly said and countable, no? —Michael Z. 2008-06-02 17:28 z

Firstly, I'm not sure that that has to be countable; I don't see anything wrong with "that rice is disgusting", but I'd never say *"that's a disgusting rice" or *"those rice(s) are disgusting." (Or am I missing something?) But secondly, "that behaviour won't be tolerated" (possibly countable) gets 2 distinct Ghits, while google:"such behaviour won't be tolerated" (clearly uncountable) gets 36, and "that behaviour will not be tolerated" gets 11, while "such behaviour will not be tolerated" gets 308. Even when we remove the context from the search, and therefore include psychological examples in the counts, Google estimates "that behaviour" at 322 kGhits and "such behavior" at 529 kGhits. —Ruakh_TALK 22:37, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I see that nothing has been done to harmonise the entries for three years. Do other languages really have different words depending on whether the behavior is that of animate or inanimate things? I suggest that we combine the two senses at behavior into a single definition (something along the lines of "the way a human, a creature or a system acts"), then combine the translations, making a special note of the (few?) languages where there is a distinction. Dbfirs 20:12, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Audio file

The pronunciation of the current audio file is strange, at least not natural. Could someone kindly replace it with a more natural pronunciation? — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 08:36, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

RFM discussion: January 2021

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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behavior, behaviour

One of the entries has 6 senses but the other has only 2 senses. Yet they're the same word. Equinox ◑ 15:05, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

• Merge is  Done. —Mahāgaja · talk 20:06, 7 January 2021 (UTC)